Blood Eye(89)

'You want to walk into a man's house and drag him from his bed,' Penda asked, 'hoping that neither his woman nor any other Welsh bastard notices us?' I grinned at Penda and in the darkness I saw his teeth flash like fangs.





Oswyn was right. The place was small. There were only nine or ten dwellings, though you could still see the blackened stumps of old timbers sticking up from the ground like burnt fingers, their charcoaled surfaces catching the starlight reflected off the river. Perhaps the timbers had been left as memorials to the dead, though it was more likely that the survivors had their own lives to look to. We crouched in the darkness like wild dogs choosing our prey.





'That house there,' I said, pointing to a crude dwelling built beside a tumbledown woodpile. 'The lazy bastard who lives there shouldn't give us much trouble.'





Oswyn shook his head. 'No, Raven, that's the place we want,' he said, nodding at another house, nearer the water.





'He's right,' Penda said. 'The noise of the river will cover us.' I nodded, acknowledging Oswyn's cunning with a smile. 'Any volunteers, ladies?' Penda asked in a low voice. White eyes stared back at him and I wondered what I looked like, for my blood-eye must have been invisible.





'I'll go,' I said, unslinging the shield from my back and taking off my sword and scabbard. I would have to move silently, like a Valkyrie across the field of the slain.





Penda nodded, removing his own gear. 'Two of us should be enough,' he said, giving his own shield to a warrior named Coenred. 'Be ready to move, lads, as soon as we have the scrawny devil by the scruff of his neck.' Then the two of us crept towards the house by the river and I wondered what we would find inside.





We were flat on our bellies by the time we reached a pigpen woven from hazel. The stink filled my head, making my eyes water, and some of the animals grunted softly, stirring in their sleep as we studied the round, thatched house. The door faced north. There had once been another house facing it, but no longer, and again I wondered why these people chose to begin every day faced with the remains of ruined lives.





'Reminds them to hate us,' Penda murmured, nodding at the debris, then he looked back to the round house. 'The door might be barred. It'll be no easy thing getting in. We'll make a noise like bloody thunder.'





'No, we make just enough noise, Penda, enough to wake them up but no more than that,' I said, staring at the place. No candlelight leaked out, nor could I see any smoke rising through the thatch. 'We'll wake them and when they come outside to check . . .' I shrugged.





Penda scratched his scar. 'Better than breaking down the door,' he admitted, and in a few heartbeats I found myself to the side of the round house, cradling a slimy piglet with Penda's hands clamped around its snout.





'It won't keep still!' I hissed, struggling to hold on to the muddy creature as it wriggled for its little life and kicked with sharp trotters. 'Do it now,' I said, 'before I drop it.' Penda jabbed his long, bone-handled knife into the piglet's arse and let go of its snout so that it gave an ear-piercing squeal. 'Freyja's tits!' I hissed. 'Kill the damn thing before it wakes the dead!'





'Hold it still then, whelp!' Penda growled. He was trying to slit the pig's throat, but the animal squirmed and squealed and squawked, and so instead of slicing across, he rammed the point of the blade into its neck by its forelegs and the squealing stopped.





I heard voices inside the house, then the scratch of flint and steel. I threw the flailing animal aside just as the door opened and Penda burst into the place, dropping a woman with a punch before she could scream, and I leapt inside, spun and slammed my knife's hilt into a man's face, sending him sprawling.





It was over in a breath. Penda kicked the man in the head for good measure and with him slung over my shoulder we made our way back to the waiting Wessexmen whose dark shapes now stood out in the landscape like timbers from King Offa's wall. I whispered my thanks to Loki the Trickster, the Sly One, who had seen fit to reward our mischief.





Then we fled north along the riverbank, through long grass and reeds, seeing by the starlight reflected off the fast-running water and hoping its murmur would smother our passing. I gave the limp Welshman to Coenred whose legs were thick as tree trunks and the Wessexman threw him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. I caught up with Penda who set the pace.





'We'll be lucky to get any sense out of him,' I said as we ran bent low across ground left marshy from the Wye's swollen months.





'He'll be fine, lad,' Penda replied. 'That's the thing about the Welsh. Hard buggers. Takes a lot to kill 'em.'





'Shouldn't we try to get him talking?' I asked, my shield thumping my back, which was beginning to ache from running bent. I hoped Cynethryth's stitches would not tear open. 'Weohstan could be back in that village for all we know.'